HTPC Fullscreen panels II

It's been a while since I've posted in here, but thought I'd share what I've been working on. I hadn't made a lot of changes until recently when I started adding new things. I have no idea if anyone would want this stuff, but even if they don't, it ought to give people some ideas. I obviously started with Ojdo's great WSHtpc04 theme, and then went crazy. The bones are the same, but I changed just about everything in it, and added a crap ton. Hopefully ojdo won't mind the thread highjack, but this thread needs a bumping to the top anyway.

Here's kind of the basic standard look now: ). This is an EP, and it's noted as such in the tag grid (anything other than Album is listed there). I should also explain what the divider is between the artist name and the rest of the tags. I wanted a way to display information about dates added, first and last played without just throwing a bunch of dates at you. The bar is a visualization, and the left side is essentially the date it was added, and the right side is today's date. The first color is the amount of days between added and first played, the middle light colored bar is from first played to last played, and the last bar is from last played to today's date. If the song has never been played, it shows three evenly spaced bars, like it does in this image.

I wanted all of the easy to change settings to be persistent, have defaults and be changeable without editing the script. I added a settings menu which allows all of these to be edited. As you can see, I have images for the various codecs. Since almost all of the music on my computer is in mp3, I have the option set to not display the codec for mp3s. In the tag grid on the left I also show the number of channels (and what channels they are!) for any source with more than 2 channels.

I have translation tags for songs/albums which have foreign names. The contents of those tags appear in brackets. As you can see, the long song name, plus the translation is REALLY long, and thus the fonts for the song title on the bottom adjust to fit. The song title at the top on the left, also goes through three different font sizes to see if the entire name will fit in as large a font as possible. It will only use two lines at maximum though. The tag grid will adjust to show the full album name no matter what.

The theme is super image intensive as you can tell, which makes sharing it a little difficult (particularly since you need the HDLogos and Record Label images on your computer). If anyone is interested, I'll figure something out (possible using a shared folder on dropbox so that it'll stay synced up as new images get released).

HTPC Fullscreen panels II

I'm blown away by the amount of dedication you have in preparing all the high-resolution imagers. Do you prepare the artist/label logos yourself for the consistent look/sizing? I also used the idea to represent added/first_played/last_played on a timeline in an older configuration, but your execution looks much better.

HTPC Fullscreen panels II

I'm blown away by the amount of dedication you have in preparing all the high-resolution imagers. Do you prepare the artist/label logos yourself for the consistent look/sizing? I also used the idea to represent added/first_played/last_played on a timeline in an older configuration, but your execution looks much better.

For the artist and label images, I do some of them (in the case of the labels, a lot of them). My original idea was just to add label images. I downloaded a pack of 250 or so of them from an xbmc theme. They were all 161x109, which is kinda small, but looked alright. Then I decided adding band logos would be cool too. There was a website that would generate most played artist logo maps for last.fm (the precursor to lastfmlogos.info). They made available a zip file of 5000+ artist logos. I was originally using that but the logos are pretty small (160px wide) and some of them frankly sucked. Then a year ago I discovered fanart.tv and realized that they had started from a similar spot with both artist and label logos, but they were doing them in high-resolution; 800x310 for the artist logos and 400x270 for the labels. For artists I have two folders, the original 5000 small logos, and then a high res folder which currently only has 550 logos, but they all look pretty great. I've filled in a lot of gaps, but fanart.tv could always use more people creating these. I display the record labels at 200x135 if I have a high res version and then artist logos on a sliding width based on the amount of space I have between the album art and the left side of the screen. This means that for album art that is a lot wider than taller, they shrink down, and almost makes the theme pretty good for running at whatever screen resolution you want. Most of my time lately has been spent creating cd and vinyl artwork for fanart.tv. I'm pretty good with photoshop, and it's a lot of fun trying to create realistic looking artwork, particularly for vinyl. For downloading artwork I use AlexVallet's AlbumArtDownloader, and wrote a script specifically for fanart.tv to make grabbing cdart a lot easier.

As for the date timeline, I got the idea from your earlier theme, and frankly I'm not super enamored with my idea, I just can't think of anything I like better. I tried adding numbers like you had, but thought it looked a bit cluttered. The problem is that it's never more than 150px wide and when you're looking at a song that's been in your library for 4 years, it's impossible to glean much useful information from it. If you waited a month before listening to it, that first bar is like 3 pixels wide. I'm definitely open to suggestions.

Thanks for getting me started down this path. I'm pretty happy with how things look, and I've become a pro at messing with WSHPanels

HTPC Fullscreen panels II

MordredKLB, you certainly did a great deal of work - it looks interesting. I'm always looking for ideas and the code behind it to make my little mods better and improve on my noobish WSH and JS knowledge, so it would be great if you could post your script. I'm not looking to run it in a panel at this time, so no need for my benefit to post all the images to make it work - just the script would be great.

HTPC Fullscreen panels II

Looks great MordredKLB! Does your CDArt spin like it does on the fanrt.tv website? I've been trying to get it to do so using WHS Panel Mod, but I have no coding skills and have been unable to get it to do it as smoothly as it looks on the website.

HTPC Fullscreen panels II

Looks great MordredKLB! Does your CDArt spin like it does on the fanrt.tv website? I've been trying to get it to do so using WHS Panel Mod, but I have no coding skills and have been unable to get it to do it as smoothly as it looks on the website.

Unfortunately, no. I tried to make the cdArt "slide" out from behind the album art and spin while doing so, but it was way too jerky with my setup. WSHPanel is just kinda slow drawing rotated images of that size. You might be able to do it smoothly in a dedicated WSHPanel with a solid color background and nothing else in the on_paint callback. I did a lot of debug timing to speed things up (my theme is pretty optimized) and found that just drawing the cdArt for me took about 300ms. Whenever I had to repaint part of the window that extended into that area, it was extremely slow... and when the image is rotated the "area" it covers becomes more diamond shaped... even though it's just transparent in most of it. To speed things up on each new track I would draw the rotated cd into a non-rotated gdi Image that was the same size, and then I draw that second image non rotated. Dropped the refresh time down to about 25-30ms I think.

HTPC Fullscreen panels II

Thank you for sharing!!! Some questions:I have a lot vynil rips, Can you recomended simple photoshop template for create Vinyl Label Art (cdart template from funart.tv have big central hole), i need same template without that hole.What with lyrics? Your script don't get lyrics from the web?